I approach poetry with a sense of devotion. There are rituals I like to adhere to. When I am working on a poem, my day opens with it and closes with it. I tend to think about it all the time, though I have other commitments too, not least accounting. I used to wonder if artists are all obsessive about their arts, but I have found that I am not that way when I am painting. Painting, to me, is not as compulsive a desire as poetry. When I paint, I can set the paper aside, but it is not so when I am writing, at least not with as much ease and forbearance. I am not a watercolourist but I am reminded of Derek Walcott, who said, “I’m content to be a moderately good watercolourist. But I’m not content to be a moderately good poet. That’s a very different thing.” I write into the night since the morning is often lost to other engagements, but also because it tends to be quieter and stiller than other phases of the day. I am easily distracted by sound and movement; it is why I face a wall when I write; it is why I have a fan in my room that is loud enough to drown out other sounds and consistent enough to not intrude into my head. And despite all these arrangements, I find myself writing, reading, and revising, at odd points along the day.

I believe all writers of poetry are also keen readers of poetry. When I started writing poetry, the poets I read were all deceased and predominantly European. I read William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, C.P. Cavafy, and later, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, and eventually, Homer and Dante, among others. I read classical Chinese poetry through Arthur Waley’s translations, Japanese poetry through Kenneth Rexroth’s translations, Prakrit poems translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Sanskrit poets like Kalidasa, Vijjaka, Bhartrihari, and Shilabhattarika, in various anthologies, translated by different poets, and American poets like Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and others. I read a few Hindi poets, too, but not as often as I would have liked to. I have not read too far beyond Mahadevi Varma, Kunwar Narain, Vinod Kumar Shukla, and Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena. I started to delve into Indian poetry only two years ago, though I had read A.K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar before. Unfortunately, I am limited to English and Hindi. I can read German, but I am not capable of reading poetry in the language.

I would hesitate to consider any particular writer a ‘poetic influence’. One is nourished by so many. The tradition is old and glorious, and we find our place in it. Poetry is also rarely influenced by poetry alone. Music is very important to me, and so is art, so is nature. I find it dangerous to be too purposeful about what one reads. We should allow ourselves the freedom to read with no particular intention in mind, to be guided by curiosity and pleasure, to read prose and poetry, and between and beyond, to read the sea with as much devotion as a book. There are intellectual influences, but I would not consider them more or less important than sensory influences, at least not with regard to poetry.

Over time, my poems have become more structured. If an idea comes to me, I look for a form that could accommodate it. I have also found that revision is often more fruitful than writing. One must strive for a few good poems. The length of my poems tends to vary, and so does the voice. I am not in favour of the notion that poets must have a distinctive, unchanging voice that is consistent throughout their body of work. It is an unnecessary constraint.

In An Essay on Virginia (1925), William Carlos Williams said, ‘Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all compositions. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. There is no less significant matter for the attention. Every piece of writing, it matters not what it is, has unity. Inexpert or bad writing most terribly so.’ He said this with regard to the essay as a form, though I reckon it holds true for poetry, too.

I have not been a poet long enough to say, with any certainty, what poetry is. It is just as hard to tell why one writes poetry, though I believe it is a question worth seeking an answer to if there is one at all. I suppose poetry is simply thrust upon some of us. We write because we happen to.